RFID technology has conquered many areas in which barcodes, magnetic strips and contact smartcards were used previously. Everyday applications, such as electronic ticketing, access cards, debit cards and electronic identity documents would not be possible without this technology.

MIFARE is the most widely used RFID technology, and this book provides a practical and comprehensive introduction to it. Among other things, the initial chapters cover physical fundamentals, relevant standards, RFID antenna design, security considerations and cryptography.

The complete design of a reader’s hardware and software is described in detail. The reader’s firmware and the associated PC software support programming using any .NET language. The specially developed PC program, “Smart Card Magic.NET”, is a simple development environment that supports sending commands to a card at the click of a mouse, as well as the ability to create C# scripts. Alternatively, one may follow all of the examples using Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition.

Finally, the major smart card reader API standards are introduced. The focus is on programming contactless smartcards using standard PC/SC readers using C/C++, Java and C#.